A New New Deal

By Rick Perlstein

Published: January 25, 2004

FOR THE SURVIVAL

OF DEMOCRACY

Franklin Roosevelt and

the World Crisis of the 1930s.

By Alonzo L. Hamby.

Illustrated. 492 pp. New York:

Free Press. $30.

IT was eight years ago this month that a Democratic president proclaimed in a State of the Union address that ''the era of big government is over.'' Now comes the first major work of scholarship to show a similar skepticism toward the era when big government began. And just as Bill Clinton made his pronouncement with a cadre of angry and aggressive right-wing Congressional warriors at his heels, Alonzo L. Hamby, who has enjoyed a long career producing mostly affectionate portraits of liberalism in its heyday, has published his more tempered assessment at a moment of right-wing stirrings on the battlefield of historiography. A standard piece of conservative folk wisdom has begun to find scholarly expression in works like Jim Powell's ''FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression.'' If that book tells a Newt Gingrich kind of story, ''For the Survival of Democracy'' is a history of the New Deal in the spirit of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Hamby, a distinguished professor at Ohio University, knows exactly what he's doing here. The generation that created his field, he writes in an epilogue, ''established a tone that still dominates the study of American politics in the 1930's: a near-adulatory perspective, occasionally nagged by a sense that F.D.R. was too 'conservative' to lead us entirely into the promised land of equalitarian social democracy.'' He also notes the inconvenient fact that hobbles them: it's impossible to argue that the New Deal accomplished what it set out to do, namely, to produce a genuine economic recovery.

But it is not in answering the question ''Did it work?'' that Hamby ventures his most aggressive contribution to this discussion. He's more interested in what there was to admire in Roosevelt's attempt. He concludes: not too much.

Hamby navigates his path through the inquiry by way, to appropriate a Clintonian metaphor, of triangulation: charting the fortunes of the world's largest economy in comparison with the ones in second and third place, Britain and Germany. This makes for an awkward narrative. A stock-footage retelling of the dramatic collapse of Weimar democracy alternates with pages on England's colorless march toward ''a vigorous policy of social benefits to the extent that fiscal responsibility allowed it.'' The effect is akin to watching sequences from a Hollywood battle epic intercut with stretches of televised golf.

The comparative method works better for another of the author's purposes: it constructs a judgment seat from which to indict the New Deal. Britain's response to the Depression, a civilized diet of national sacrifice, balanced budgets and a lack of charisma, Hamby finds splendid. ''A dynamic force can be a very terrible thing,'' declared Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the nearly forgotten figure who is this book's unlikely hero, and Hamby quite agrees. The grim spectacle of Hitler provides the counterexample. So where does that place Franklin Roosevelt? In a rather awkward spot, as it turns out: closer in many of his economic policies to Hitler than to Baldwin, Hamby suggests. That the New Deal approached the status of fascism was a common if ''crude libel'' of Roosevelt's enemies at the time, Hamby says at one point. But faint echoes of that libel can be found in this book.

Hamby builds part of his case on one word, ''corporatism'' -- an economic system driven by the planning decisions of large cartels. The early New Deal experimented with corporatism, Hamby points out. And he goes on to show that corporatism was a feature of the economy ruled by Hitler. Hamby hedges the comparison. Yet Roosevelt's traditional enemies would have found much to applaud in statements like: ''The Nazi recovery program organized the economy in ways that bore a clear surface resemblance to the early New Deal.''

What is more, Hamby displays an insensitivity to Roosevelt's leadership style. The president liked farming out the same task to more than one bureaucratic rival, Hamby correctly observes, adding, ''The tactic, more suited to a dictator fearing overthrow by a lieutenant than to a democratic leader, simply created friction and inefficiency.'' Later he adds a stiletto thrust: ''Both Roosevelt and Hitler . . . seem to have consciously played off subordinates against one another as a means of preserving their ultimate power.''

But there is another, less accusatory explanation for Roosevelt's management technique. It points not to Roosevelt's will to power, but to his maturity. As the law professor Cass Sunstein has argued, Roosevelt assigned projects to multiple subordinates of opposing opinions in order to mitigate one of the problems of democratic governance: it let him hide his own preferences so that his aides would not simply tell their boss what they thought he wanted to hear. In that way, Roosevelt avoided surrounding himself with yes men. Democracy survived the Great Depression in part because the president remained, despite temptations, despite lapses, a thoroughgoing democrat.

Hamby also makes some scholarly omissions. To take one example, his criticism of Roosevelt's ''100-proof soak-the-rich'' tax politics is oblivious of work arguing that Roosevelt was actually employing opportunistic rhetoric to obscure tax policies that were on balance regressive. And by repeating the orthodox wisdom about the universality of classical liberalism in American political culture, Hamby fails to acknowledge recent demonstrations that, for instance, American labor law before Roosevelt was in fact based in feudalism. Before the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, courts habitually struck down laws reforming the workplace by following common-law doctrine -- that the ''master-servant'' relationship could not be interfered with through legislation. It is therefore false to claim, as Hamby does, that American trade unions achieved justice and benefits only for their members.

Making that point may take us into the realm of ideology. But that's just fine. Some interpreters of the New Deal lean left, some are centrist, others right-wing, and this is all to the good: let a hundred flowers bloom. Liberals should welcome the opportunity to test their received opinions against new, less positive interpretations of the New Deal. But this book is not likely to be the one that will persuade them to change their ''near-adulatory'' opinions about Roosevelt.

Rick Perlstein is the author of ''Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.''